Friday, September 9, 2016

Birdwatch: Malabar pied hornbill

Illustration:by George Boorujy

Even considering the wonderful variety found among the
world's birds, hornbills are truly bizarre creatures. Both males and females
have a huge, bony structure on top of their bill, giving them a unique and
rather comical appearance. The casque, as it is known, is light and hollow, and
enables the birds' calls to resonate through their dense jungle habitat.

Many hornbill species also display rather unusual breeding behavior,
during which the male walls up the female in her nest, trapping her there so
that she is entirely dependent on him for food while she is incubating her
eggs.

Despite their politically incorrect marital habits, I have
always had a soft spot for hornbills, having seen several different species –
including the huge ground hornbills – in Africa. So on my recent visit to SriLanka I was keen to catch up with them.

We began at Yala, Sri Lanka's best-known national park, and
home to some spectacular birds. Little green bee-eaters swooped for insects,
Indian peafowls dashed across the path, and rose-ringed parakeets screeched
overhead.

The lagoons at Yala are home to hordes of waterbirds, with
four different kinds of kingfisher, including the enormous stork-billed as well
as our own familiar species. We watched with trepidation as gaudy painted
storks fed among the crocodiles, seemingly unconcerned about the danger, while
a pair of white-bellied sea eagles sparred with one another overhead.

Our appetite whetted, we began our second game drive,
venturing deeper inside the reserve. As we turned a corner I spotted a pair of
Malabar pied hornbills perched on top of a tree, easily identified by their
huge size and striking black-and-white plumage.

These spectacular hornbills were just one of almost 150
different kinds of bird we saw during our fortnight's stay. Birders come here
in search of the 33 species of endemic bird found in Sri Lanka and nowhere
else. But given that finding many of these entails long hours spent tramping through
leech-infested jungles, we wisely set our sights on more accessible creatures.

We still managed to see more than a dozen endemics,
including the globally threatened Sri Lankan whistling thrush, the striking Sri
Lankan scimitar babbler, and my favorite, the Sri Lankan junglefowl – a bird
which, like its Indian cousin, bears a striking resemblance to a farmyard
cockerel.

Sri Lanka is also a great place to see a wide range of
mammals. We enjoyed brief but good views of three different leopards, the
mysterious and highly nocturnal grey loris, and both blue and killer whales off
the north-east resort of Trincomalee.

But there is something about those hornbills that sticks in
the memory. Perhaps it was because they seemed entirely unconcerned about our
presence as we watched them, using those huge bills to delicately pick fruits
off the tree before swallowing them whole.